Using SSH with the Pulumi Docker Provider
In August 2023, Pulumi released a version of the Docker provider that supported SSH-based connections to a Docker daemon. I’ve written about using SSH with Docker before (see here), and I sometimes use AWS-based “Docker build hosts” with my M-series Macs to make it easier/simpler (and sometimes faster) to build x86_64-based Docker images. Naturally, I’m using an SSH connection in those cases. Until this past weekend, however, I hadn’t really made the time to look deeper into how to use SSH with the Pulumi Docker provider. In this post, I’ll share some details that (unfortunately) haven’t yet made it into the documentation about using SSH with the Pulumi Docker provider.
First, let’s talk about some prerequisites to making this work.
- You’ll need Docker installed locally. I fairly certain this is only the
dockerCLI (much in the same way the Pulumi Kubernetes provider requireskubectlto be installed locally), but I haven’t verified this for certain yet. I tested this from a Linux system running Docker 24.0.7; I think the earliest version that is supported is 18.09. - You’ll need Docker installed on the remote SSH host (obviously). I used Flatcar Container Linux (stable channel) on AWS.
- Continue reading

